Deadline Looming for Microsoft in Antitrust Case

gaijincory writes "The International Herald Tribune reminds us that the end of the month is Microsoft's deadline to comply with the European Commission's antitrust ruling. The fine for non-compliance? A cool $5 million per day."

And at that rate...

[T(V)oney]

... they would have a few months to figure out what they wanted to do about it.

They will never pay

[tetrode]

Or do you think they will ever pay up?

Don't be redicilous - they will find their way around it. The same as they find their way around not paying taxes, ...

what is to stop the EU

[Dance_Dance_Karnov]

from increasing the fine if MS doesn't comply and just pays it out?

to point out the obvious.

[silverkniveshotmail.]

they're likely to go a little into the red of this fine, but it'd be stupid to think that they'd just go on for ever. yeah, sure, they make a lot of money, but it's not like they're going to just write it off. And even if they DID; don't you think the EU would try and do something to further encourage them?

Re:And at that rate...

[unleashedgamers]

Hey its more like they would have years to figure out what they wanted to do if its only a little less than 2 billion a year.

Re:wtf

[Kinky Bass Junk]

(From The Seattle Times [nwsource.com]) "It amounts to about $3,000 per hour for one lawyer, more than $2,000 an hour each for 34 other attorneys and $1,000 an hour for administrative work."

Yes, i know that's an old article, but it would more than likely be similar. When worked out as a 8hr day (9-5), i got $65,400 - not quite $5 million a day.

Re:This the same EU?

[Anonymous Coward]

What IBM did was to play by the government's rules, and yes it in some senses beat them at that game. It did not do anything the equivalent of telling the courts that it wasn't going to bother paying a fine as the previous poster seemed to think was plausible here. Now, if you're saying that Microsoft will continue to fight this through the court process and could end up winning if only through being willing to throw enough resources at it to drag the process out then MAYBE you're right, but that's a different position to the previous one based on "what is their actual power to enforce these laws".

Re:Bill Will Fill

[R.D.Olivaw]

The perfect solution would then be to announce that they will use the fines to finance Microsoft competitors (oss?). That would bring MS around quite quickly.
IT's not going to happen, I know. I am sure it would work well though.

Re:And at that rate...

[should_be_linear]

Not really. If regulation bodies in EU recognize that MS is happy with 5M/day, commision will be glad to increase it. Don't forget that majority in EU parliament and commision are leftist parties (socialists, greens). It would be political suicide for them to be fooled by mother of all evil (in their mind): Giant American Corporation.

Re:Bill Will Fill

[zerbot]

I dunno. Bill Gates has contested fines and taxes that were levied on him personally. Once he got ticketed for failure to stop at a stop sign, he didn't have proper proof of insurance on him, got cited for that too, and later showed that he did have insurance, just didn't have the card with him. He asked for mitigation of the fine even though it was a piddling amount of money for him.

Then when he had his house built, he contested the assessment on it because he said that the high cost was largely due to the number of change orders involved in the construction, and did not accurately reflect the true market value of the house. Again, the property taxes were piddly compared to his income.

Re:Why exactly..

[Tune]

> In short, the better solution would be to have the most popular media players
> all available in a default install - IE, install Windows, and it gives you a
> menu of which player you want installed. Same with Linux.

Hmm OK. If that's exactly what Microsoft would have done from the start -- include only the most popular players in a default install -- everyone would still be using Netscape and RealPlayer.

Afterall, those were the most popular applications before microsoft started pushing them out of the market. At the time, IE & MediaPlayer were hardly better, so they would only have gained a marginal momentum if they'd had to compete on equal terms.

So yes, your suggestion sounds great, and yes, it would have made Windows a much weaker product (from a marketing perspective).

IHT

[rathehun]

What is up with the Herald Tribune website? Increase the text size in Firefox, it looks like crap. Turn off style-sheets to be able to read more easily - BANG - three or four copies of the article.

Somebody needs to hire a web-designer who wasn't trained on Frontpage.

Also - a minor point, the $47 billion that MS apparently has, is not cash under the pillow. What it does have is a share value (not sure of terminology) of $47 billion.

Once shareholders see that shrinking - and believe me, they're watching, they're going to sell, sell, sell. The downward spiral. Now this does not give them 21.7 years (as some other bright spark commented) to comply with the regulation.

R.

CCIA

[SgtChaireBourne]

Bill: Here's a $1,000,000 check for you and the jury
Judge: Ok, this antitrust case is over. Next.

That's approximately how the conflict with the CCIA [theregister.co.uk] was resolved.

What if ms doesn't pay?

[TheCoop1984]

What if microsoft refuses to pay up? What's the EU going to do then? They can't really stop microsoft products being sold in the EU, there would be a europe-wide riot. If ms refuses to pay, the EU wont be able to do a thing.

Re:Funny thing is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you not see the difference between a set of libraries that provide functionality that applications can use, and applications that use them?

Users use applications. The competition is between applications. Microsoft bundles applications. Microsoft can kill competitors by bundling applications. Microsoft should not bundle applications. Microsoft was forbidden from bundling applications.

Users don't see libraries. The competition is not between libraries. Microsoft bundles libraries. Microsoft cannot kill competitors by bundling libraries. Microsoft should bundle libraries. Microsoft was not forbidden from bundling libraries.

You really can't see the difference?

BTW, the above applies to Internet Explorer vs the Trident rendering engine as well. Microsoft argued that Internet Explorer was part of the operating system and could not be removed, when in actual fact it was Trident that was part of the operating system and could not be removed. Netscape couldn't have cared less if Trident was bundled with Windows, but Internet Explorer being bundled with Windows damn near killed them.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

The power of the competition minister is not fines

[dyfet]

The EU competition ministry can impose multiple fines, however, I do not think they can ever exceed 5% individually, or 10% collectivily, of world-wide revenues in the effected products. And of course, they can be subject to delay, and reduction to perhaps meaningless levels on appeal. Some have also suggested that as this is less than the unusual profit margins in the monopoly products, and so even that may have no direct impact on Microsoft's behavior (Microsoft could simply raise prices for example).

However, the treaty of Rome and subsequent enabling treaties which empower the EU compeitition ministry to do this also gives them one other important power which they have so far not used; the right to set aside and void contracts. This was originally intended to set asside member state and commercial contracts which were created under unfair bids, but I don't recall seeing anything in the treaty language nessisarly limiting it's action in this regard other than past uses. What if the EU competition ministry really grew a set, and choose instead to try and void the Microsoft EULA within the European Union as an instrument of unfair bargaining by an illegal monopoly? It may just actually have the authority to do this. Certainly it does have the clear authority, which it has used before, to explicitly cancel existing government and private contracts, though would normally do so individually rather than wholesale. Certainly if they even tried to do this, whether attacking large individual contracts, or, wholesale liberation of their consumers, it would be a much more effective action against Microsoft's monoply business practices than any piddly fine...

Re:And at that rate...

[Anonymous Coward]

What difference does it make? As soon as the EU passes the software patent directive, Microsoft will have an effective legal monopoly on the European software industry anyway, by way of charging everyone what it wants for use of "inventions" such as progress bars.

All thanks to a load of corrupt politicians who sold their government out for the sweet sweet lobbyist dollars.